The Sixth Element
Title: The Sixth Element
Author: clodia_metelli
Characters: Relmyna Verenim, Nanette Don.
Rating: R for gore, cannibalism.
Book/Source: Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, the Shivering Isles
Disclaimer: No profit is being made from this.
Summary: It is rumored that screams of agony are carried away on the wind as it passes through Xaselm... for a very good reason. Because they are.
A/N: Another time I will know better than to explore Xaselm before dinner, oh my god. A seriously unpleasant place. Let this be a warning for anyone else who might do the same!
Wordcount: 624
~ the sixth element ~
It is rumored that screams of agony are carried away on the wind as it passes through Xaselm...
~ Rumours from the Shivering Isles.
Relmyna Verenim is deep in the sixth element, Flesh.
About her, screams pool: sound interwoven with sinews, a tapestry of fluids and ash and sobbing. The testing goes on. She moves methodically through layered sound and fleshly smells: meat burnt, cut, soiled, spoiled, rotting from the bone. Charred and frozen, shot through with arrows, resurrected, shambling, stitched and reassembled. The full spectrum. Tomorrow she’ll write up the experiments. Today she constructs. Today she mends.
The pregnant Breton female’s in a cage nearby. Only one shambles this time: Relmyna wants to be transported while working on transcendental matters, not distracted by having to resurrect the Breton twice an hour. Its sounds are ossified: bone joints clicking, tangled in blood and blonde hair.
Bone and flesh, clicks and screams. Relmyna’s up to her elbows in a would-be Flesh Atronach’s rib cage. She pushes deep into liquefying tissues, past softened organs: the heart, unbeating, clotted up with tarry blood. It fills her nose, her hungry eyes, her ears with the stickiness of yielding flesh. The Breton female shrieks like gold thread through blue; the shambles is stripping away skin.
There. The jewel’s in place. She pulls out slowly.
It’s midday and Relmyna can hear Nanette rummaging through the storage crates, because her flap-tongued apprentice hasn’t realised yet that the only food in Xaselm is flesh. Nanette screams coarsely, like a rough cartoon. Relmyna only let the girl out of her cage after she heard the Breton’s surpassing music. She’ll go back in as soon as Relmyna’s devised a suitable experiment concerning severed tongues. Relmyna, I’m hungry, she whimpers, and Relmyna says: that is because meat, like the fire that births it, desires to consume. What reason is that to disturb my work?
Nanette slinks off, starving. Relmyna’s hands are blackened and dripping; morsels of flesh cling between her fingers, under her nails. She pieced together two different types of elves for this atronach: will this weaken or strengthen the resulting atronach, she wants to know. It gapes open on the slab, a lifeless mess of limbs and arteries. The sauce streaks Relmyna’s tongue like birthing fire. Between her teeth, the morsels release succulent bursts of decay.
The first elf was a Dunmer: she calculated his race’s pain threshold with the exquisite precision possible only when the final stage is death. Such fools, those mages back in Cyrodiil. No one can ever get anywhere without pushing the boundaries of knowledge. The second elf was a Bosmer. Tell me, she said, can you still feel any of your amputated limbs after being shot with an arrow? Two arrows? Half a dozen? Now let me castrate you. On a scale of one to ten, how much does this hurt?
The heart is ruptured. Relmyna divides it methodically on the slab, then eats it slowly, a strip at a time. The Breton’s anguish still thrills in her ears.
She looks for void essence to fill the hollowed torso. It should be on the shelf. It’s not. That fool Nanette’s been tidying up again.
Nanette, she says. Come here. I wish to instruct you in the nature of Pain.
Instruction would be more satisfying if Nanette’s screams were more refined. Afterwards Relmyna makes a round of the experiments. The Hunger confined within viewing distance of the unspoiled Altmer maid is frothing madly: Relmyna makes a note to carry out that test tomorrow. The elf’s a naked, shuddering wreck in her own cage. Would a Bosmer or a Dunmer maid be braver? Another note. Of course unspoiled Dunmer maids are hard to find. The amputation experiment further down the hall looks promising. All that remains to do is write up the results. And then present them to my Lord Sheogaroth... Relmyna moves on.
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